This invention relates generally to knowledge management systems, and particularly to the development, use and maintenance of knowledge base systems.
One environment in which knowledge management systems are particularly useful is the computer product support industry. The computer systems on today""s desktops are complicated. They involve many products (hardware and software) from many vendors. The products may or may not operate as expected when configured into a system. In addition, the user guides and references for the products are often incomplete and not always accurate. When end users have problems with their computer systems, they often need help diagnosing and then solving the problem. The computer product support industry has developed in response to that need. When a caller into a technical support organization reports a problem with a product in a certain environment, a technical support representative, sometimes known as an agent, diagnoses and attempts to solve the problem.
However, a mountain of knowledge is necessary in order to provide support for computer products. End users"" answers might be found in a public document, or in a customer""s or vendor""s confidential information, or in a company""s bank of general or confidential knowledge. In addition, through support interactions, a company generates a vast array of knowledge, particularly in areas such as product interoperability. Knowledge is always being generated because the resolution to an end user""s problem may even need to pieced together from many sources of information, public and private combined.
A computer product support provider""s challenge is to handle the increasing technical complexity of support delivery while keeping service quality and customer satisfaction high and costs low. Companies must establish a support infrastructure that enable them to capture, refine, and publish customer service and support information with greater efficiency through a variety of support channels. Adopting a knowledge management approach is an effective means to meet urgent customer demands.
One part of the knowledge management approach is the development and maintenance of knowledge bases as a part of a company""s knowledge management system. With the proliferation of information that is needed to run businesses today, many companies are turning to knowledge base systems to store and provide access to its information. Knowledge bases provide a framework for collecting, organizing and refining the full range of information that is both collected and generated daily by a company. Knowledge bases process the new information, transforming it into actionable knowledge, present it in a consistent format, and make it readily available. They make a company increasingly effective in gathering and leveraging xe2x80x9cinstitutional memory.xe2x80x9d Thus, knowledge bases provide a company with the opportunity to reuse the knowledge that it collects and creates. Such reuse is beneficial because it allows companies to use its data to conduct is business more quickly and efficiently than previously possible.
While knowledge bases provide some real benefit to companies that invest in their creation, they are expensive in time, resources and money to develop and maintain. Once deployed, knowledge bases need careful maintenance to keep up to date. Knowledge, being dynamic, is always being created and collected. Typically only a fraction of the knowledge developed by an entity is captured and reused. The use of the knowledge base itself can result in the creation of new knowledge and therefore new content for the knowledge base. Therefore, it is essential to keep them updated. However, since it is complicated and expensive to update knowledge bases system, knowledge bases often go outdated almost immediately. The company""s challenge is to handle the increasing technical complexity of the knowledge it develops and collects, while keeping costs low.
Typically, also, even when the knowledge is captured in a knowledge base, it is not incorporated into the knowledge base at an appropriate level of abstraction. Often, specific instantiations of the knowledge are added, resulting in a knowledge base that is cumbersome to search and hard to maintain. If the information is generalized too much, appropriate resolutions will not be presented in response to queries.
It is therefore an object to treat knowledge as an asset that provides a substantial competitive advantage, and to leverage knowledge to improve customer satisfaction. It is an object of this invention to develop knowledge management systems that allow a company to manage the knowledge it collects and creates, make it available for use it in conjunction with the other systems and processes used by the company, and monitor its use. It is a further object of this invention to develop and deploy a knowledge base so that it quickly contains a vast array of information. It is also an object to seamlessly integrate the knowledge base with the other systems and processes used by the knowledge base user, and develop operational processes for keeping the knowledge base updated. Finally, it is an object of this invention to provide systems for generalizing knowledge as much as possible and for modifying a knowledge base only as much as is needed to add new knowledge and ease technology reuse.
In accordance with the present invention, there is described a method of adding knowledge into a knowledge base in which knowledge is stored in a plurality of existing knowledge objects having existing elements of information. The method involves identifying new knowledge created by use of the knowledge base and objectifying the new knowledge by treating the new knowledge as a potential new knowledge object having at least one potential new element of information. The knowledge base is amended to store the new knowledge by doing one of the following: amending an existing knowledge object to store the new knowledge, or adding a new knowledge object to store the new knowledge.
Before storing the new knowledge, the knowledge base is reviewed to identify affected knowledge objects, which are knowledge objects in the knowledge base that have existing elements of information that would be affected by addition of the potential new knowledge object into the knowledge base. In the preferred embodiment, an affected knowledge object could be an existing knowledge object into which the potential new knowledge object could be incorporated, or it could be an existing knowledge object that could be incorporated into the potential new knowledge object. Further, it could be an existing knowledge object having existing knowledge from which additional new knowledge could be developed when the existing knowledge is combined with the new knowledge.
The knowledge base could be reviewed by submitting queries to the knowledge base and reviewing reports of knowledge objects in the knowledge base, with the knowledge objects sorted by associated domains. The review involves generalizing each of the potential new elements, and comparing each of the generalized new elements to the existing elements to identify affected existing elements that would be affected by addition of the generalized new elements into the knowledge base. Any additional new knowledge is developed that can be developed when the generalized new elements are combined with the affected existing elements.
The knowledge base is amended by incorporating new knowledge and any additional new knowledge into the knowledge base. The affected knowledge objects are updated to include the new knowledge and any of the additional new knowledge. When the review identifies no affected knowledge objects, a new knowledge object is added to store the new knowledge.
In the preferred embodiment, the elements of information are records and associations between records represented by links. Therefore, existing elements are existing records or existing links, and potential new elements of information are potential records and potential links. Affected records are existing records that would be affected by addition of the potential new records into the knowledge base. Affected links are existing links that would be affected by addition of the potential new knowledge object into the knowledge base.
In accordance with a further aspect of the invention, there is also described a method of incorporating knowledge about a first domain into a knowledge base in which knowledge about the first and second domain is stored in a plurality of knowledge objects and existing elements of information. The method involves identifying new knowledge, created by use of the knowledge base, in the first domain. The new knowledge is objectified by treating it as a potential new knowledge object having at least one potential new element of information. The knowledge base is amended to store the new knowledge.
Before the knowledge base is amended, the new knowledge is reviewed with the knowledge in the second domain, to identify affected knowledge objects. Each of the potential new elements is generalized and compared to the existing elements in the second domain to identify affected elements. Any additional new knowledge is developed that can be developed from the generalized new elements and the affected existing elements in the second domain. When the review identified no affected knowledge objects in the second domain, the new knowledge object is added to the first domain.